Black Light Quotes & Sayings

I am Charles Mingus. Half-black man. Yellow man. Half-yellow. Not even yellow, nor white enough to pass for nothing but black and not too light enough to be called white. — Charles Mingus

He seemed to hasten the retreat of departing light by his very presence; the setting sun dipped sharply, as though fleeing before our nigger; a black mist emanated from him; a subtle and dismal influence; a something cold and gloomy that floated out and settled on all the faces like a mourning veil. The circle broke up. The joy of laughter died on stiffened lips. — Joseph Conrad

A black dog, tall and wide as a full grown man, took a couple of steps toward them. It bared sharp, yellow fangs big as Bowie knifes. Drool dripped from them to the dried grass below. Unable to help it, Lee wet his pants when he saw the animal's eyes. It had four glowing orbs that burned with a smoldering red light like the fires of Hell. — Pamela K. Kinney

They were jet, those wings, as deep as the sky, as black as Eoduin's hair - no, blacker, for they were dull, unoiled. They gave off no sheen in the light, no gleam to the eye. They drank up the light and diminished it: they were wings of pure shadow. — Meredith Ann Pierce

Love is a word, another kind of open.
As the diamond comes
into a knot of flame
I am Black
because I come from the earth's inside
take my word for jewel
in the open light. — Audre Lorde

When finally the sky grew ink-black, the trees were visible only as their swaying branches blotted out the stars that crossed in blazing showers, as sometimes they do. The language of the stars, seldom read and heeded less, told beautifully and in silence of all the victories that had ever been won and all the defeats ever suffered. In uncountable lines of light across the widest sphere, the stars spoke of everything notable even down to a leaf blowing rhythmically in the wind. — Mark Helprin

The term 'black' was given a rebirth by the black youth revolt. As reborn, it does not refer to the particular color of any particular person, but to the attitude of pride and devotion to the race whose homeland from times immemorial was called 'The Land of the Blacks.' Almost overnight our youngsters made 'black' coequal with 'white' in respectability, and challenged the anti-black Negroes to decide on which side they stood. This was no problem for many who are light or even near-white in complexion, for they themselves were among the first to proclaim with pride, 'call me black!' Those who hate the term but hold the majority of leadership positions feel compelled to use it to protect their leadership roles. — Chancellor Williams

I met a girl, Doc."

He let out a light laugh. "You meet girls every day, Connor; this is nothing new. — Sandi Lynn

Nick was waiting for him.
Gabriel hesitated. He wished those text messages had come with some kind of sign, whether Nick was pissed or exasperated or just completely done with him. Hell, a freaking emoticon would have been helpful.
His own room sat pitch-dark at the opposite end of the hallway. A black hole. Gabriel eased around the creaky spot in the floor and slid past his twin's room. Once in his own, he flung his duffel bag onto the ground and shut the door, closing the dark around himself. He sighed and kicked his shoes into the well of blackness under the bed. Maybe Nick hadn't heard him. Maybe he thought he was still out in the car.
"You are so predictable."
Gabriel swore and fumbled for the light switch.
Nick was straddling his desk chair backward, his arms folded on the backrest.
"What the hell is wrong with you?" Gabriel snapped. "Why are you sitting here in the dark?"
His twin shrugged. Because I knew you'd walk right past my room. — Brigid Kemmerer

Wind comes in, your candle tips over and flares up, and a loose tent-flap catches fire, and through the widening black-edged gap you can see the eyes of the howlers, red and shining in the light from your burning paper shelter, but you keep on writing anyway because what else can you do? — Margaret Atwood

It is only an island of light surrounded by a vastly greater area of greyness and that fades ultimately into the black of ignorance. — George R R Martin

Who you were," Lyre corrected, wiping his hand across the trickling blood on his face, smearing it over one cheek. "But it doesn't matter. You're still female." Natania's eyes narrowed, then she threw her head back and loosed a chiming peal of laughter. "You think you can defeat me with aphrodesia?" Lyre's eyes darkened to black. "I already have." Natania took a quick step back, her hand clenching around the Sahar as power leaped into her. Lyre's hand snapped down the front of his shirt where he kept his chain of spelled gems. He yanked it out, blood-coated fingers already clenched around a gem. Gold light flashed. The world went black. — Annette Marie

The river was behind him. The wind was full of acid. In the slow float of light I looked away, down at the river. On the brink of freezing, it gleamed in large, bulging blisters. The water, where it still moved, was black and braided. And it occurred to me then how it took hours, sometimes days, for the surface of a river to freeze over - to hold in its skin the perfect and crystalline world - and how that world could be shattered by a small stone dropped like a single syllable. — Nam Le

The world is a shoulder of dark meat (black flesh of an old mule). And the light is on the other side. — Federico Garcia Lorca

Suddenly, I became conscious of the fact that the driver was in the act of pulling up the horses in the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the sky. — Bram Stoker

A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage tells of a young boy's travels through the black heart of Depression American and his search for light both metaphorical and real. Writing with a controlled lyrical passion, Marly Youmans has crafted the finest, and the truest period novel I've read in years. — Lucius Shepard

Each time I glanced into the rearview mirror, the black around my eyes was bigger and darker. Every once in a while Tom and I would look at each other with a silent acknowledgement that we had just worked our greatest match. When I think of it now, a quote from Georges Braque comes to mind: "Art is a wound turned to light." To my mind, that is also the beauty of pro wrestling. — Bret Hart

I've seen most of what
there is to be afraid of in this world, and to tell you the truth,
the worst of them are the ones that make you afraid in the
light. The things that your eyes see plainly and can't forget
are worse than huddled black figures left to the imagination.
Imagination has a poor memory; it slinks away and goes
blurry. Eyes remember for much longer. — Kendare Blake

When I was in the Navy, everyone fell under the purview of "navy gray". It is the military's way of reminding its enlisted personnel that they are all equal. Man or woman, black or white, young or old, everyone was navy gray. With God's grace I can proudly say a better understanding of this concept has helped me ameliorate disputes, mend fences that appeared hopeless and find light in the midst of darkness. — Carlos Wallace

How was the light today?"
"Big. Hot. Yellow-white. The sky's blue was like a drumbeat. I watched the black tree shadows revolve. When the sun went down it was like someone's hand was pulling it, very gently. It was soft-edged and orange. The land went purple, then dark blue and grey, then black. Then you opened your eyes. — Glen Duncan

It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets. — Cormac McCarthy

I smiled half a smile at her puppy antics, wondering what it would be like to be able to join her, to shed my human skin and the confines that went with it and just live in the moment as a wolf. What would I look like with four legs and fur - would I be light-colored like Katie, or a darker timber, like Dev? I wondered if I would be velvet black with ice-blue eyes, like Chase. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

There was a black sedan with tinted windows at the end of the lot--the windows cracked down enough for her to see two sunglassed agents of a vague yet menacing government agency watching her intently. One of them had a camera that kept going off, but the agent didn't seem to know how to deactivate the flash. The light against the tinted windows made the shots worthless, and the agent cursed and tried again and it flashed again. Jackie waved good night to them, as she always did. — Joseph Fink

I believe that God is like a powerhouse, like where you keep electricity, like a power station. And that he's a supreme power, and that he's neither good not bad, left, right, black or white. He just is. And we tap that source of power and make of it what we will. Just as electricity can kill people in a chair, or you can light a room with it. I think God is. — John Lennon

When you say that you are a race man, it means that you embrace the entire black community regardless of the hue, whether somebody is very light and could pass for possibly white or someone is very dark. — Ed Smith

The way black women say "girl" can be magical. Frankly, I have no solid beliefs about the survival of consciousness after physical death. But if it's going to happen I know what I want to see after my trek toward the light. I want to see a black woman who will smile and say, "Girl ... — Abigail Padgett

Wolf's fur was speckled with drops of blood that had beaded on it like rain. The gravel in the alley shone in the half-light from the distant street lamps. The wolf's muzzle, a little shorter and broader than I had seen on Wild Kingdom, was drawn back, black lips from fangs striped white and red like peppermints. Its eyes were blue, rather than any proper lupine shade, and gleamed with a sort of demented awareness. — Jim Butcher

Rolfe unlocked the door, muttering, "This had better be worth my time," and stalked into the awaiting dimness beyond. Then stopped dead.
Even in the watery light, Dorian could perfectly see the woman sitting at Rolfe's desk, her black clothes dirty, weapons gleaming, and her feet propped on the dark wooden surface.
Aelin Galathynius, her hands laced behind her head, grinned at them all and said, "I like this office far better thank your old one Rolfe. — Sarah J. Maas

There was something sly about his smile,
his eyes so black and sharp, his rufous hair. Something
that sent her early to their trysting place,
beneath the oak, beside the thornbush,
something that made her climb the tree and wait.
Climb a tree, and in her condition.
Her love arrived at dusk, skulking by owl-light,
carrying a bag,
from which he took a mattock, shovel, knife.
He worked with a will, beside the thornbush, beneath the oaken tree,
he whistled gently, and he sang, as he dug her grave,
that old song ...
shall I sing it for you, now, good folk? — Neil Gaiman

They don't fit you?" V asked his roommate.
"Not the point. No offense, but these are wicked Village People." Butch held his heavy arms out and turned in a circle, his bare chest catching the light. "I mean, come on."
"They're for fighting, not fashion."
"So are kilts, but you don't see me rocking the tartan."
"And thank God for that. You're too bowlegged to pull that shit off."
Butch assumed a bored expression. "You can bite me. — J.R. Ward

I? I am the wind,' said Thowra. 'I come, I pass, and I am gone.' The strange feathers moved up and down, the strange voice said tartly: 'And are your sons the same?' 'My son is the lightning that strikes through the black night. My grandson is light that pierces the dark sky at dawning.' 'Ah,' said the first emu, 'and we know your daughter is the snow that falls softly from above and clothes the world in white. You want but the rainbow - that is and was and never will be, and is yet the promise of life - and the glittering ice which is there and is gone: then you and your family will possess all magic. — Elyne Mitchell

To whoever will listen.

I've been thinking about black holes a lot. How their gravity is so strong it bends time and space. How you'd be stretched down to atoms passing the event horizon.

I kind of feel like I'm being stretched to atoms. Like I'm falling apart and becoming so metaphorically thin that I'm transparent. But, as nothing that happens past the event horizon affects the universe outside of it, nothing that I'm feeling is affecting anyone in the outside world, either.

The event horizon is a point of no return. Nothing, not even light, can escape it.

I wonder what will happen when I pass the event horizon and fully submerge myself into the black hole.

There are theories that if you enter a blackhole under a specific angle, you'll survive and hit the bottom of it. The chances are incredibily small.

I doubt I'll survive. — Emily Trunko

All of it seems like noise and false light, and all I want for tonight is quiet, the black and gray of a summer night, and a girl in a pink dress, beside me forever. — Brad Barkley

Las Vegas has become a child's picture-book dream of a city-here a storybook castle, there a sphinx-flanked black pyramid beaming white light into the darkness as a landing beam for UFOs, and everywhere neon oracles and twisting screens predict happiness and good fortune, announce singers and comedians and magicians in residence or on their way, and the lights always flash and beckon and call. Once every hour a volcano erupts in light and flame. Once every hour a pirate ship sinks a man o'war. — Neil Gaiman

The process of dying begins with the dissolution of the elements within the body. It has eight stages, beginning with the dissolution of the earth element, then the water, fire and windelements. The color: appearance of a white vision, increase of the red element, black near-attainment, and finally the clear light of death. — Dalai Lama

B4 U,my life ws lyk a moonless night.Very dark, but der wer stars,points of light & reason.And den you shot
across my sky like a meteor.Suddenly everythng ws on fire;ter ws
brilliancy,der ws beauty.Wen u wer gone,wen d meteor had
fallen over d horizon,everythng went black.Nothing had changed,but
my eyes wer blinded by d light I cudn't c d stars anymore & ter was no more reason, for anything. — Stephanie Mayer

Her Kind

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind. — Anne Sexton

Everlasting Light

Let me be your everlasting light
Your sun when there is none
I'm a shepherd for you
And I'll guide you through
Let me be your everlasting light

Let me be your everlasting light
Your home when there is cold
In me you can confide
When no one's by your side
Let me be your everlasting light

Oh baby, can't you see
It's shining just for you
Loneliness is over
Dark days are through
They're through

Let me be your everlasting light
Your train going away from pain
Love is the coal that makes this train roll
Let me be your everlasting light

Yeah, let me be your everlasting light
Let me be your everlasting light
Be your everlasting light — The Black Keys

The hedges and driveways were black and silent, but he imagined the silhouette of a jacket hood could move into view at any time, skimming past the light of a window like a shark's fin. — Teresa Flavin

The Thwaites lived on Central Park West in the upper Eighties, in a building that, while manifestly grand, particularly to someone from Ohio, was by no means the most elegant among its neighbors. Its lobby, for one thing, was little more than a wide corridor, with two drably upholstered wing chairs propped against a wall and, between them, a glass table upon which rested an elaborate but unaesthetic arrangement of silk flowers. The light in the corridor was greenish, dim and lavatorial, barely illuminating the shallowly carved figures that marched, in pseudo-Egyptian fashion, along the pink stone tiles as far as the elevator. The floor, incongruously, was of a black and white parquet, upon which all but the softest slippers echoed ominously. And the elevator itself - paneled, with brass fixtures and a single tiny red velvet stool, presumably for its operator's comfort - seemed again of a different, though no less ancient, era. — Claire Messud

Something that is appealing is wars are terrible and ugly and hard and each conflict is different, but of every conflict I've ever gone to, I've also seen people being extraordinary in a good sense. It's not just a black and white extreme situation that pushes people to extremes and they do crazy bad stuff. You also see crazy brave stuff. You see humanity in a different light. — Shaul Schwarz

We'd never seen anything as green as these rice paddies. It was not just the paddies themselves: the surrounding vegetation - foliage so dense the trees lost track of whose leaves were whose - was a rainbow coalition of one colour: green. There was an infinity of greens, rendered all the greener by splashes of red hibiscus and the herons floating past, so white and big it seemed as if sheets hung out to dry had suddenly taken wing. All other colours - even purple and black - were shades of green. Light and shade were degrees of green. Greenness, here, was less a colour than a colonising impulse. Everything was either already green - like a snake, bright as a blade of grass, sidling across the footpath - or in the process of becoming so. Statues of the Buddha were mossy, furred with green. — Geoff Dyer

Six bad hombres have tried to kill Ramos. Ramos went to all six funerals, just in case any of the bereaved wanted to take a shot at revenge. None of them did. He calls his Uzi "Mi Esposa" - my wife. He's thirty-two years old. Within hours he has in custody the three policemen who picked up Ernie Hidalgo. One of them is the chief of the Jalisco State Police. Ramos tells Art, "We can do this the fast way or the slow way." Ramos takes two cigars from his shirt pocket, offers one to Art and shrugs when he refuses it. He takes a long time to light the cigar, rolling it so that the tip lights evenly, then takes a long pull and raises his black eyebrows at Art. The theologians are right, Art thinks - we become what we hate. Then he says, "The fast way." Ramos says. "Come back in a little while." "No," Art says. "I'll do my part." "That's a man's answer," Ramos says. "But I don't want a witness. — Don Winslow

From the black ocean comes the appearance of light and waves. It helps you imagine birth. I want imagination in the photographs I take. It's like a prologue. You wonder, What's going on? You feel something is going to happen. — Rinko Kawauchi

But...what makes you Nathan--what makes you so special--is that you are both White Witch and Black Witch, both dark and full of light. That's what I love about you. What I've always loved. And I love you still, Nathan, and I know I always will. But you're changing. And now...now what I fear is that you'll get the amulet and you'll hone the Gifts you took from your father. You'll be invulnerable and you'll kill more people, many, many more people. I fear you won't be able to stop and you'll lose yourself completely. And then I'll come to dread you too. — Sally Green

The radar directed flak intensifies. Like swarms of angry red-and-yellow-eyed snakes slithering up invisible ropes in the sky. The sky around them is a glittering maelstrom of light. The stars pale into insignificance. Down below the city is lit up in sections as shockwaves fan out in kaleidoscopic bursts. Shell smoke rising up from the ground. On his right a burst of flame and a thick guttering of black smoke lit up by the geometry of the searchlights. — Glenn Haybittle

...you carry in yourself all the obstacles necessary to make your realization perfect. Always you will see that within you the shadow and the light are equal: you have an ability, you also have the negation of this ability. But, if you discover a very black hole, a thick shadow, be sure that somewhere in you there is a great light. It is up to you to know how to use the one to realize the other. — The Mother

I had not expected the gentle, tentative surge of gratitude I began to feel...for St. Paul's School, the spring, and the early morning. I needed the morning light and the warbling birds. I needed to find a way to live in this place for a moment and get the good of it. I had tried to hold myself apart, and the aloneness proved more terrible than what I had tried to escape. — Lorene Cary

I gradually shrank in size until I was a teenager, then a child, and then, at last, a baby, crawling, until inevitably I was sucked naked and screaming through that portal every man's mother possesses, into a black hole where all light vanished. As that last glimmer faded, it occurred to me that the light at the end of the tunnel seen by people who have died and come back to life was not Heaven. Wasn't it much more plausible that what they saw was not what lay ahead of them but what lay behind? This was the universal memory of the first tunnel we all pass through, the light at its end penetrating our fetal darkness... — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Like a dying star, grace dissipates in a final burst of pale light, and is then engulfed by the black hole of ungrace. — Philip Yancey

The intervening years are sucked down these acheronian halls like light into a black hole while you helplessly teeter upon the event horizon, where time is measured by the beating of a fly's wing in the stagnant air. — Rick Yancey

And there in the middle, high above Prechistensky Boulevard, amidst a scattering of stars on every side but catching the eye through its closeness to the earth, its pure white light and the long uplift of its tail, shone the comet, the huge, brilliant comet of 1812, that popular harbinger of untold horrors and the end of the world. But this bright comet with its long, shiny tail held no fears for Pierre. Quite the reverse: Pierre's eyes glittered with tears of rapture as he gazed up at this radiant star, which must have traced its parabola through infinite space at speeds unimaginable and now suddenly seemed to have picked its spot in the black sky and impaled itself like an arrow piercing the earth, and stuck there, with its strong upthrusting tail and its brilliant display of whiteness amidst the infinity of scintillating stars. This heavenly body seemed perfectly attuned to Pierre's newly melted heart, as it gathered reassurance and blossomed into new life. — Leo Tolstoy

A witch is a woman who emerges from deep within herself. She is a woman who has honestly explored her light and learned to celebrate her darkness. She is a woman who is able to fall in love with the magnificent possibilities of her power. She is a woman who radiates mystery. She is magnetic. She is a witch. — Dacha Avelin

Limp Bizkit is my main priority, but my side project, Black Light Burns, is still a labor of love. We have a record written, so we'll see when that comes out. When we tour, we go out in a van and trailer with me driving. — Wes Borland

The way a source strains toward the light, toward the air. Its laboring work, its effort, its black passageways like despair. That's the way a poet looks for words. With muscles, gestures. — Anna Kamienska

THERE IT IS,' my mother says, and what she means is that the dot we've been nearing for weeks, the one that's been growing into a larger dot with two smaller dots circling it, has now become even larger than that, growing from a dot to a disc, shining back the light from its sun, until you can see the blue of its oceans, the green of its forests, the white of its polar caps, a circle of colour against the black beyond. — Patrick Ness

Tell them I'm like you," Gavriel said as they began to slow down.
Aidan laughed. "I think they can see you're not like us anymore."
"No," he said. "Tell them you know me. That I'm like you, one of you. From the party. Tell them."
"Wait," said Winter. "Wait. Is he saying he wasn't at the party? Did you meet him by the side of the road? Did you pick up a hitchhiker who coincidentally turned out to be a vampire?"
Gavriel fixed his gaze on Winter. "You know me," he said, and a chill went up Tana's spine. "You've known me since outside the rest stop, when I turned and the light hit my face."
"What does he mean?" Midnight asked.
"I don't know," Winter said in an odd voice. "Nothing. — Holly Black

Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash. — Louis Aragon

She was floating in the midst of a black sea, in the darkest of nights, with no hope or care to see light again. She was a mere wave away from drowning in blackness. — Anam Iqbal

If it had been a heart attack, the newspaper
might have used the word massive,
as if a mountain range had opened
inside her, but instead
it used the word suddenly, a light coming on
in an empty room. The telephone
fell from my shoulder, a black parrot repeating
something happened, something awful
a sunday, dusky. If it had been
terminal, we could have cradled her
as she grew smaller, wiped her mouth,
said good-bye. But it was sudden,
how overnight we could be orphaned
& the world became a bell we'd crawl inside
& the ringing all we'd eat. — Nick Flynn

This house has been far out at sea all night, The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills, Winds stampeding the fields under the window Floundering black astride and blinding wet Till day rose; then under an orange sky The hills had new places, and wind wielded Blade-light, luminous black and emerald, Flexing like the lens of a mad eye. — Ted Hughes

To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light. — Jean Baudrillard

I could no longer afford to be jealous or unfriendly, because, as soon as I was, a bandage came down over my eyes, and I was bound hand and foot and cast aside. All at once a black hole opened, and I was helpless inside it. But when I was happy and serene, approached people with confidence and thought well of them, I was rewarded with light. — Jacques Lusseyran

For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave, The black minute's at end, And the elements' rage, the fiend voices that rave, Shall dwindle, shall blend, Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain, Then a light, then thy breast, O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again, And with God be the rest! — Robert Browning

I'm sorry. I'm a little on edge."
"No need to remind me," Mg. Aviosky quipped just as a real person emerged from that second right, some sort of ledger in his hands.
"There are guests at the door," the man said, closing the ledger. The ensuing burst of air rustled his wavy black hair. In words pitched at a light baritone, he added, "And I would have thought the knock gave it away. — Charlie N. Holmberg

(Harry Reid) was wowed by Obama's oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama - a 'light-skinned' African American 'with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one. — Harry Reid

Now the red eyes and the light above seemed to bore into Charles, and again the pupils fo the little boy's eyes contracted. When the final point of black was lost in blue he turned away from the red eyes, looked at Meg, and smiled sweetly, but the smile was not Charles Wallaces smile. — Madeleine L'Engle

The path to glory is rough, and many gloomy hours obscure it. May the Great Spirit shed light on your path, so that you may never experience the humility that the power of the American government has reduced me to. This is the wish of a man who, in his native forests, was once as proud and bold as yourself. — Black Hawk

Presently we saw a curious thing: There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share - black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun. Even — Willa Cather

I am thinking of one woman and the rest is blotto. I say I am thinking of her, but the truth is I am dying a stellar death. I am lying there like a sick star waiting for the light to go out. Years ago I lay on this same bed and I waited and waited to be born. Nothing happened. Except that my mother, in her Lutheran rage, threw a bucket of water over me. My mother, poor imbecile that she was, thought I was lazy. She didn't know that I had gotten caught in the stellar drift, that I was being pulverized to a black extinction out there in the farthest rim of the universe. — Henry Miller

The guitar. Rubbing the gentle polish
On Every smooth contour.
On the lap. Knowing every curve
As the light shines from it.

On stage a planned metamorphosis
Takes places as the hours go by and the
Space is transformed to a concert hall.
The energetic nemesis has struck.

The risers are transformed into a stage
And black boxes turned into powerful
Pieces of sound equipment.
The spring is taut.

Backstage while pandemonium
Sweeps the hall and people
Crowd the arena as ants flow to a cake.

The stage is set, the
Instruments tuned and placed.
The musicians work out last minute
Kinks as the lights dim.

An intense force hits the spectators.
Energy is released in every form.
A power rage beyond comprehension. — David Morrell

The bar staff and croupiers all wore black with the same green triangle logo emblazoned on their shirts, and contact lenses which made their eyes shine an eerie, vibrant green. The bar optics glowed with the same green light, the intensity of which was linked to the music. As the bartender walked away to fetch the drinks, a breakdown in the techno track commenced and the bottles began to palpitate. The bartender's eyes glowed with a hallucinatory felinity that made Mangle feel nervous. — R.D. Ronald

No matter how bleak and black her existence became, the familiar sight of the moon restored something within her, small as it was - like tiny fluttering wings of flame beating back the darkness. — Shona Moyce

I like to describe my life as a black hole with a little light out there. — Dennis Rodman

In this light your eyes look almost purple. Like black raspberries.'
Belle laughed softly. 'You must be in a state of perpetual hunger. You keep likening me to fruit. — Julia Quinn

As for their houses, it is no use looking for them, because they are the exact opposite of our houses. You can see our houses by day but you can't see them by dark. Well, you can see their houses by dark, but you can't see them by day, for they are the colour of night, and I never heard of anyone yet who could see night in the daytime. This does not mean that they are black, for night has its colours just as day has, but ever so much brighter. Their blues and reds and greens are like ours with a light behind them. The palace is entirely built of many-coloured glasses, and is quite the loveliest of all royal residences, — J.M. Barrie

Figure 18. As the thickness of a layer increases, the two surfaces produce a partial reflection of monochromatic light whose probability fluctuates in a cycle from 0% to 16%. Since the speed of the imaginary stopwatch hand is different for different colors of light, the cycle repeats itself at different rates. Thus when two colors such as pure red and pure blue are aimed at the layer, a given thickness will reflect only red, only blue, both red and blue in different proportions (which produce various hues of violet), or neither color (black). If the layer is of varying thicknesses, such as a drop of oil spreading out on a mud puddle, all of the combinations will occur. In sunlight, which consists of all colors, all sorts of combinations occur, which produce lots of colors. — Richard Feynman

I only think about you. The black abyss inside my head is obliterated by your light. I'm too absorbed in your tight body and swollen lips. You chase away my demons. — K. Webster

But when you walk through yonder gate," Churchill said, pointing toward the Middle Tower at the end of the causeway, which was visible only as a crenellated cutout in the orange sky, "you'll find yourself in a London you no longer know. The changes wrought by the Fire were nothing. In that London, loyalty and allegiance are subtle and fluxional. 'Tis a chessboard with not only black and white pieces, but others as well, in diverse shades. You're a Bishop, and I'm a Knight, I can tell that much by our shapes, and the changes we have wrought on the board; but by fire-light 'Tis difficult to make out your true shade. — Neal Stephenson

The impressionistic method leads into a complete splitting and dissolution of all areas involved in the composition, and color is used to create an overall effect of light. The color is, through such a shading down from the highest light in the deepest shadows, sacrified an degraded to a (black-and-white) function. This leads to the destructions of the color as color. — Hans Hofmann

I keep quiet and look out the window. The light is weak and watery-looking, like the sun hast just spilled itself over the horizon and is too lazy to clean itself up. The shadows are as sharp and pointed as needles. I watch three black crows take off simultaneausly from a telephone wire and wish I could take off too, move up, up, up, and watch the ground drop away from me the way it does when you're on an airplane, folding and compressing into itself like an origami figure, until everything is flat and brightly colored - until the world is like a drawing of itself — Lauren Oliver

You're not just looking up into a curtain of black. You're looking into the eye of the universe. Stare for a while and you start to realize -- on a deep, gut level -- that the moon is a giant rock circling us in space. The sun is a violent, fusion-fueled ball of plasma and gas millions of miles away that destroyed the atmospheres of all of the inner planets (including Mars, which is farther away from it than we are) and would do the same to ours if we weren't lucky enough to have a magnetic field that diverts the solar wind. The cute little pinpricks of light you see out there are other giant, explosive, incredibly pissed-off balls of gas floating in an infinite void, most of which are far more impressive than our puny sun. And that smear of milky white through the sky? That's the center of our own galaxy -- a gigantic pinwheel circling a supermassive black hole like floating detritus around the vortex of a flushing toilet. — Johnny B. Truant

Black holes provide theoreticians with an important theoretical laboratory to test ideas. Conditions within a black hole are so extreme, that by analyzing aspects of black holes we see space and time in an exotic environment, one that has shed important, and sometimes perplexing, new light on their fundamental nature. — Brian Greene

World rotted as we slid from light into darkness, getting ever nearer to the black chaos in which this middle world would end and the gods would fight and all love and light and laughter would dissolve. — Bernard Cornwell

I rushed off to Whitehall and assumed Aidan would head back to Astor. But when I turned around briefly, I saw Aidan uncoiling her black scarf from around her neck. She held each end of the scarf above her head, the silk capturing the wind, arching above her like a parachute. Aidan released one end, kiting the scarf. The wind swirled around her for a moment before Aidan let go completely. She was an excellent student. The light silk caught a thermal and rose, sailing above the water. A dark black bird against the blue sky. — Amber Dermont

The Creator sat upon the throne, thinking. Behind him stretched the illimitable continent of heaven, steeped in a glory of light and color; before him rose the black night of Space, like a wall. His mighty bulk towered rugged and mountain-like into the zenith, and His divine head blazed there like a distant sun. At His feet stood three colossal figures, diminished to extinction, almost, by contrast
archangels
their heads level with His ankle-bone. When the Creator had finished thinking, He said, "I have thought. Behold!" He lifted His hand, and from it burst a fountain-spray of fire, a million stupendous suns, which clove the blackness and soared, away and away and away, diminishing in magnitude and intensity as they pierced the far frontiers of Space, until at last they were but as diamond nail heads sparkling under the domed vast roof of the universe. — Mark Twain

I invent her, then, as a woman emerging from the sea.
A tall man meets here on the black sand.
You've come back, he says.
Can barely see her in the sea-light.
They make love there, and become horses.
As night grows black they become weeds — Maggie Nelson

Separation by death must finally be choked down,
but separation in life is a long anguish,
Chiang-nan is a pestilential land;
no word from you there in exile.
You have been in my dreams, old friend,
as if knowing how much I miss you.
Caught in a net,
how is it you still have wings?
I fear you are no longer mortal;
the distance to here is enormous.
When your spirit came, the maples were green;
when it went, the passes were black.
The setting moon spills light on the rafters;
for a moment I think it's your face.
The waters are deep, the waves wide;
don't let the river gods take you. — Du Fu

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air -
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music - like the rain pelting the trees - like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds -
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life? — Mary Oliver

The light, by the light, by the light of the bloodred moon. I'll be killing you soon. — Holly Black

Look at the sky. It's not dark and black and without character. The black is, in fact deep blue. And over there: lighter blue and blowing through the blues and blackness the winds swirling through the air and then shining, burning, bursting through: the stars! And you see how they roar their light. Everywhere we look, the complex magic of nature blazes before our eyes. — Richard Curtis

Even the leftover carats of tar in the gutter, so black they seemed to suck
the light out of the air.
By nightfall kids had come across them: every sidewalk on the block was
scribbled with obscenities and hearts. — C. K. Williams

Your peaks are beautiful, ye Apennines!
In the soft light of these serenest skies;
From the broad highland region, black with pines,
Fair as the hills of Paradise they rise,
Bathed in the tint Peruvian slaves behold
In rosy flushes on the virgin gold. — William C. Bryant

Now hollow fires burn out to black, And lights are guttering low: Square your shoulders, lift your pack And leave your friends and go. — A.E. Housman

Look, they're wearing light blue gauzy frozen superhero capes because I have told them that Anna is a junior superhero with a black sister and a gay brother- both of whom are off ruling other countries because, y'know, they have jobs. You do your mothering your way. I'll do my mothering mine . — Shonda Rhimes

Her house looked cold from the foggy lea,
And the square of each window a dull black blur
Where showed no stir:
Yes, her gloom within at the lack of me
Seemed matching mine at the lack of her.
The black squares grew to be squares of light
As the eyeshade swathed the house and lawn,
And viols gave tone;
There was glee within. And I found that night
The gloom of severance mine alone — Thomas Hardy

I was working with a Crookes tube covered by a shield of black cardboard. A piece of barium platino-cyanide paper lay on the bench there. I had been passing a current through the tube, and I noticed a peculiar black line across the paper ...
The effect was one which could only be produced in ordinary parlance by the passage of light. No light could come from the tube because the shield which covered it was impervious to any light known even that of the electric arc ...
I did not think I investigated ...
I assumed that the effect must have come from the tube since its character indicated that it could come from nowhere else ... It seemed at first a new kind of invisible light. It was clearly something new something unrecorded ...
There is much to do, and I am busy, very busy.
[Describing to a journalist the discovery of X-rays that he had made on 8 Nov 1895.] — Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen

I am a black bird, a Raven, I am Raven. I know and I am knowing - I know and see life and death, expansion and contraction and I do not shiver and cry - I am unafraid.

I am Raven. I am black as liquid night with wings and my eyes are stars to see by.

The light within me leads the way and it is revealed through my eyes and I am what lies between the dark and light.

I am the balance between. — Sophia Rose

Here comes the light, nameless and intangible, streaming 93 million unobstructed miles through the implacable black vacuum to break itself against a wall, a cornice, a column. It drenches, it crenellates, it textures, It throws the city into relief. The coins fall through the slot; the illumination box clicks on. — Anthony Doerr

It's not that I'm being shy. It's just that
well, for one, I don't even remember the event. It's a blank: a white slate, a black hole. I have vague images, half-impressions: of being, or having been
or, more precisely, being about to be
hit; blue light; railings; lights of other colours; being held above some kind of tray or bed. But who's to say that these are genuine memories? Who's to say my traumatized mind didn't just make them up, or pull them out from somewhere else, some other slot, and stick them there to plug the gap
the crater
that the accident had blown? Minds are versatile and wily things. Real chancers. — Tom McCarthy